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what you know paints a true and rich picture of the realities that will affect your decision.
Deciding is the process of choosing which knowledge should be drawn upon—both the facts of this particular “what is” and your broader understanding of the cause-effect machinery that underlies it—and then weighing them to determine a course of action, the “what to do about it.”
weigh first-order consequences against second- and third-order consequences,
Never seize on the first available option, no matter how good it seems, before you’ve asked questions and explored.
Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all.
Don’t mistake opinions for facts.
know how much learning you can get out of any one dot without overweighing it.
Everything important in your life needs to be on a trajectory to be above the bar and headed toward excellent at an appropriate pace.
“By-and-large” is the level at which you need to understand most things in order to make effective decisions.
There are typically just five to ten important factors to consider when making a decision.
You need to know which level is appropriate to your decision.
only going below the line when it’s necessary to illustrate something about one of the major points.
Remember that multiple levels exist for all subjects. 2. Be aware on what level you’re examining a given subject. 3. Consciously navigate levels rather than see subjects as undifferentiated piles of facts that can be browsed randomly. 4. Diagram the flow of your thought processes
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Sometimes it’s smart to take a chance even when the odds are overwhelmingly against you if the cost of being wrong is negligible relative to the reward
evaluate the marginal benefit of gathering more information against the marginal cost of waiting to decide.
Slow down your thinking so you can note the criteria you are using to make your decision. 2. Write the criteria down as a principle. 3. Think about those criteria when you have an outcome to assess, and refine them before the next “one of those” comes along.
THINKING PRINCIPLES ALGORITHMS
In order to have the best life possible, you have to: 1) know what the best decisions are and 2) have the courage to make them.
going after what you want, b) failing and reflecting well through radical open-mindedness, and c) changing/evolving to become ever more capable and less fearful.
TABLE OF LIFE PRINCIPLES • Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2, and do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you consider the best thinking available to you. LIFE PRINCIPLES INTRODUCTION • Look to the patterns of those things that affect you in order to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them and to learn principles for dealing with them effectively. PART II: LIFE PRINCIPLES 1 Embrace Reality and Deal with It 1.1 Be a hyperrealist. a. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful
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PART III: WORK PRINCIPLES • An organization is a machine consisting of two major parts: culture and people. a. A great organization has both great people and a great culture. b. Great people have both great character and great capabilities. c. Great cultures bring problems and disagreements to the surface and solve them well, and they love imagining and building great things that haven’t been built before. • Tough love is effective for achieving both great work and great relationships. a. In order to be great, one can’t compromise the uncompromisable. • A believability-weighted idea
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For any group or organization to function well, its work principles must be aligned with its members’ life principles.
recognize when outcomes are inconsistent with goals and then modify designs and assemble people to rectify them makes all the difference
great partnerships come from sharing common values and interests, having similar approaches to pursuing them, and being reasonable with, and having consideration for, each other.
hold each other to high standards and work through their disagreements.
Power should lie in the reasoning, not the position, of the individual.
limit broad transparency are: 1. Where the information is of a private, personal, or confidential nature and doesn’t meaningfully impact the community at large. 2. Where sharing and managing such information puts the long-term interests of the Bridgewater community, its clients, and our ability to uphold our principles at risk (for instance, our proprietary investment logic or a legal dispute). 3. Where the value of sharing the information broadly with the community is very low and the distraction it would cause would be significant (compensation, for instance).
high level of mutual consideration for each other’s interests and a clear understanding of who is responsible for what.
if you look back on yourself a year ago and aren’t shocked by how stupid you were, you haven’t learned much.
Intelligent people who embrace their mistakes and weaknesses substantially outperform their peers
repeating what you’re hearing someone say to make sure you’re actually getting it—can be invaluable.
assuming you’re either not communicating or listening well instead of blaming the other party.
too emotional to be logical, the conversation should be deferred.
marginal benefits diminish as the group gets larger
The most believable opinions are those of people who 1) have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question, and 2) have demonstrated that they can logically explain the cause-effect relationships behind their conclusions.
When someone says, “I believe X,” ask them: What data are you looking at? What reasoning are you using to draw your conclusion?
If you’re not believable, you probably shouldn’t have an opinion about
Understand that nobody and nothing is perfect and that you are lucky to have by-and-large excellent relationships. See the big picture.
the ability to objectively self-assess, including one’s own weaknesses, is the most influential factor in whether a person succeeds,
Giving people the opportunity to struggle rather than giving them the things they are struggling for will make them stronger.
Sample size is important. Any problem can be a one-off imperfection or a symptom of root causes that will show up as problems repeatedly.
start with the most important questions and imagine the metrics that will answer them. Remember that any single metric can mislead;
Common sense isn’t actually all that common—be explicit.
you ask a high-level question like “How is goal XYZ going?” a good answer will provide a synthesis up-front of how XYZ is going overall and, if needed, will support it by accounting for the tasks that were done to achieve it.
Root causes are described in adjectives, not verbs, so keep asking “why” to get at them.
Avoid fixating on irrelevant details. You have to determine what’s important and what’s unimportant at each level.
